Bid-on-Equipment, an Illinois-based restaurant equipment company, recently released a study ranking the 50 best U.S. cities in which to open a restaurant. After considering 236 candidates through U.S. Census Bureau and American Community Survey data, it determined the top 10 to be:

Arlington, VA

Ann Arbor, MI

Washington, D.C.

San Francisco, CA

Atlanta, GA

Cambridge, MA

Boston, MA

Plano, TX

Seattle, WA

Bellevue, WA

Unsurprisingly, the full list leaves out New York and Los Angeles: two cities known for their high real estate prices and market saturation, leading to high restaurant turnover.

This study actually did not take real estate prices into account, due to that data being unreliable in smaller cities. Instead it used just four factors, weighting each differently:

Annual restaurant sales per capita, reflecting how much people spend on eating out (weighted at 50%)

The number of restaurants per capita, reflecting market saturation (weighted at 25%)

Median income, reflecting prospective customers (weighted at 15%)

Number of restaurant industry workers per capita (weighted at 10%)

One might argue that four factors are far too few to provide any type of actionable information for restaurateurs. Or that weighting restaurant sales at 50% is arbitrary—why not 43% or 27%?

While this data set is a good jumping off point, it’s incomplete without several other considerations, says Ryan Patel. He’s a senior fellow at Claremont’s Drucker School of Management and served as vice president of global development at Pinkberry—where I met him when I briefly consulted for the company.

For Patel, key information that’s missing here is how much consumers spend on local businesses versus big brands. “Ohio has always had a high spend of food,” he says, for example. “They spend at a top level, but they support their chains. Ohio isn’t even on this list, and that’s interesting to me.”

On the other hand, places like Austin, Texas, Scottsdale, Arizona, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bellevue, Washington, and San Francisco—all on the list—prioritize local businesses, Patel says.

“I hate to use the word hipster, but there’s going to be hip areas where people want to be able to support their brands. I think you can go up and down that list and find local brands that have flourished in each of those areas. That’s what makes them unique,” he says. “This wasn’t necessarily the case 10 years ago.”

So, despite increasing real estate costs, there’s perhaps never been a better time to be a local-only, one-off business.

Something the aforementioned cities also have in common is that they’re seeing growth of mixed-use lofts, Patel adds. These typically feature residences on the top, and retail or restaurants on the bottom. While critics accuse them of perpetrating gentrification—which rarely benefits the long-time residents in these communities—from a purely capitalistic standpoint, these lofts are favorable to prospective restaurateurs.

For one thing, restaurateurs don’t have to wait for someone else to go out of business to acquire precious square footage. (Unlike in San Francisco for example, which has relatively limited new construction in the city proper.) Additionally, entrepreneurs are more likely to get discounts from realtors who are eager to fill leases on new buildings, Patel adds. And the retail foot traffic is clearly a plus.

Perhaps the singularly most important variable business owners should look at though, is what type of restaurant they’re going for. And it’s one the study doesn’t address. Fast food? Fast casual? Full service? Cocktail bar? Third-wave coffee shop? Patel agrees that these categories are distinct enough to merit their own data sets entirely. And that’s not even taking into account additional variables like liquor licenses and seating volume, which impact consumer base and expenses.

“Think about how competitive the coffee scene has become,” he says. “Are you third wave, do you sell food, are you just a cappuccino place? Like, I’m pretty sure Ann Arbor’s coffee sales are probably pretty good.” He points to several reasons: “Caribou [coffee chain] has always done fairly well, and it’s cold in Michigan, so that doesn’t hurt.” Plus, it’s a college town.

Of course, this type of city-specific, in-depth analysis is not really possible in a national study. And maybe it's not the point—these reports aim to identify broader trends that realtors, entrepreneurs and investors can then locally investigate.

If there are broad strokes to take away here, however, Patel is confident about this: New York and Los Angeles aren’t the only two starting points if you want to grow a global brand.

“There’s this notion in retail that you have to always open in New York and L.A [if you want to make it big], and I think it’s the same for restaurants,” he says. “The idea that you have to have a flagship store… that’s not necessarily true.”

“We’ve been seeing that happen more and more in the past three to four years. If you show that you have even one or two cash flow positive units in an area like D.C. [#3 on the list], you could make an argument to investors that your concept could work all over the U.S.”